Spyglass Inc finally won some more business last week as BMC Software Inc
chose the company's web server technology to provide web-based
administration for its Patrol CGI systems management server product.
Spyglass will receive royalties for each copy of Patrol CGI BMC ships.
Other terms of the deal were not disclosed.
And to prove how badly such royalties are needed, Spyglass last week
reported its second-quarter numbers. Although net income was up 173% at
$2.1m on revenues that jumped 140% at $12m, some $8m of those revenues
came from the full and final royalty payment from Microsoft Corp for the
Mosaic browser technology on which Internet Explorer is based.
Equally worrying for Spyglass is the decision by founder and chief
technology office Tim Krauskopf to leave the company as a full-time
employee to return to academia. He will continue as a director.
There's also a one-time restructuring charge of $900,000 in the quarter
for the closure of the Champaign, Illinois development center and its
consolidation with facilities at Naperville, Illinois and Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
Mid-term net income fell 68% to $506,000 after the same charge, on revenue
up 63% at $15.9m. Net earnings per share rose 167% to $0.16 in the
quarter, and fell 67% to $0.04 for the half-year. Excluding the charge,
net income for the quarter would have been in line with the First Call
consensus of $0.20.
For some reason the Street saw this a reason to mark the shares up
sharply, but all forecasts see this quarter as a spike, with the company
not due to return to the black until the September quarter (Spyglass'
fiscal fourth) of 1998.
Spyglass's future is centered around its embedded web products: Device
Mosaic and MicroServer.
During the period Network Computing Devices Inc took Spyglass Device
Mosaic for its network computers, Xerox Corp took MicroServer for use in
future products; ViewCall America Inc licensed both product plus Spyglass'
web filtering software for its On-TV personal internet TV channel.
http://www.spyglass.com